Here I go on one of my cerebral journeys, most of which run into a brick wall and consign themselves to the ash heap. I, like most of the world, have a very short attention span, it seems, and while I have bursts of genius (I swear!) little of it makes it to the outside world. This time, the message(s) is(are) spurred by a link posted by friend Greg Phipps, with whom I worked at Peaches Records in Seattle in the 80s (Phipps, btw, records under the name Palestinian Israel-Jones, should you desire to visit his planet), who has been on a roll finding and posting or reposting questions and videos worth my, if not your, attention. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, he asked about the negativity toward celebrities “selling out,” whoring their wares for profit.

Having spent the better part of 5 years taking my band Moving Targetz from a suburban Scarborough, Ontario basement (a trend later to be repeated by the Barenaked Ladies), burning up the Queen Street circuit, forming a record label and releasing not one, but two, 12” slabs of polyvinyl chloride only to have the band self-destruct on the eve of global domination, I did some soul searching and decided that I really didn’t want the musical ideology of Targetz to die.

I’ve been around this music thing a loooong time. Three quarters of my life in fact. I started in bands when I was 17, I started my own label when I was 22 and have had a roller coaster ride of sweet success and monumental failures. But in all that time I never lost sight of being professional in every aspect of promoting my career. There was always attention paid to improving production, songwriting, musicianship and, especially, presentation (WEA Records once offered me a job to put press kits together for them after one of mine wound up on an exec’s desk). The public visage of my image and that of my music projects was toiled over, debated and deliberately calculated. Not all of it worked (see Crime Exhibit #1 above), but all of it was done with the aid of like minded people who had similar goals of putting our best face foreword.